… besides those by Anna Dalvi is Rosemary (Romi) Hill’s 7 Small Shawls. She’s publishing these as an e-book that gets updated on a regular basis to include additional patterns. I have not, I confess, knit any of these shawls yet, but I have a fantasy of working my way through all seven of them come summer.
When e-books first started coming out, I wasn’t all that enthusiastic. I’m an old school bibliophile—I love the feel of a book in my hands, the weight of it on my lap (though I don’t go so far as breathing in the fresh ink smell like the bouquet of a fine wine the way Melissa does). E-books take away most of that. Even when the book is printed out it’s not really a book: it’s a bunch of laser printed pages stacked on top of one another.
But I’ve become a convert in the past year, thanks to 7 Small Shawls and to Ysolda Teague’s Whimsical Little Knits, volumes one and two. At a time when individual pattern downloads can cost seven or eight dollars, paying two or three times more than that but getting six to eight times more patterns seems like a real deal. They’re also easy to print out, so I can get a clean copy of any pattern whenever I need one—and it is nice not to have the weight of a full book dragging about in my knitting bag.
So I’ve surprised my curmudgeonly self by embracing this technological advance in the knitting world. In fact, I fantasize about writing my own—themes, variety of patterns, ranges of yarn weights, so much to think about.